Tempograms of Hip Hop Star and Heaven.The tempo of Hip Hop Star appears very constant, while Heaven has much *inconsistency**.
- As we’ve seen in the graph of two storyboards back, the album Beyoncé seems to have a different pattern in tempo compared to the albums Dangerously In Love, B-Day Deluxe Edition, and Lemonade. Therefore, I’d like to compare the tempograms of a song from Beyoncé with a song from one of the other three albums.
- I’ve chosen to compare Hip Hop Star from Dangerously In Love with Heaven from Beyoncé, since Hip Hop Star has extremely high valence and energy and a low acousticness and Heaven an extremely low valence and energy and a high acousticness (they have the highest and lowest valence in this corpus, which can be seen in the features scatterplot from a few storyboards back).
- As can be seen, the tempo of Hip Hop Star is constant around 82 bpm, while Heaven has a more ‘noisy’ tempo. I think this has to do with the difference in acousticness. Since Heaven is almost 100% acoustic, it could be harder to determine the exact tempo.
Beyoncé’s discography, and how has her music changed over time?
Nowadays, Beyoncé is one of my favorite artists. One of the reasons I like to listen to Beyoncé’s music is because she has such a diverse style in her albums. You can find various music genres come back in her music, like R&B, soul, (dance)pop, hiphop, and funk. So far she has produced the following albums, among others:
- Dangerously In Love (2003)
- B-Day (2006)
- I Am Sacha Fierce (2008)
- 4 (2011)
- Beyoncé (2013)
- Lemonade (2016)
- The Lion King (2019)
On extravagant moments I like to listen to 4, if I want to listen to old pop classics like Halo, I put on I Am Sacha Fierce, and when I’m not feeling well I listen to Lemonade for a boost of self-confidence and some great hiphop-beats. Because I like Beyoncé’s diversity in styles and genres between and in her albums, I will research with the SpotifyR features how her music has developed over the seven albums I’ve mentioned above. I personally notice a number of differences between her albums, for example that her newer albums contain less acoustic songs and that the overall vibe is less positive. Therefore, I’m going to research the acousticness and valence of her albums. I’m expecting them to have shifted downwards after the release of her album Beyoncé, because this album is known for having a different style compared to Beyoncé’s earlier albums. In addition, I’m interested in the danceability, energy, and speechiness of her albums. However, I think these features are very high for all her albums, and that no major differences will be seen. Let’s see if this assumption is correct!
Furthermore, I would like to dive deeper in Beyoncé’s work by visualizing the specific key changes in the song Love On Top, since this song is well known for having “definitively the greatest key changes in all pop music”. Following this I am also curious in the key variation of Beyoncé’s songs and albums, so I will take a look at that as well.
Albums show a high diversity in character. A shift in valence and acousticness over time.
- In these graphs, energy, valence, acousticness, and danceability are shown of Beyoncé’s albums.
- Overall, the scatterplots show that the the songs of every album show a variety in values of energy, valence, acousticness and danceability. This shows that her albums are not static, but that the the albums have a high diversity in character.
- Furthermore, the overall valence level of her albums has shifted downwards after the release of Beyoncé. Before Beyoncé, valence values of her songs were never even close to zero, whereas her last three albums contain more lower-valued valence songs.
- Besides, acousticness has increased a bit in her last two albums, with values above 0.9. This was only seen once in her album Dangerously In Love, but not again untill Lemonade and The Lion King.
Albums show a high diversity in character. A shift in valence and acousticness over time.
- In these graphs, energy, valence, acousticness, and danceability are shown of Beyoncé’s albums.
- Overall, the scatterplots show that the the songs of every album show a variety in values of energy, valence, acousticness and danceability. This shows that her albums are not static, but that the the albums have a high diversity in character.
- Furthermore, the overall valence level of her albums has shifted downwards after the release of Beyoncé. Before Beyoncé, valence values of her songs were never even close to zero, whereas her last three albums contain more lower-valued valence songs.
- Besides, acousticness has increased a bit in her last two albums, with values above 0.9. This was only seen once in her album Dangerously In Love, but not again untill Lemonade and The Lion King.
No clear changes in speechiness, so this feature has been constant in Beyoncé’s music.
- In these graphs, the speechiness is shown of Beyoncé’s albums.
- Overall, the speechiness of Beyoncé’s albums is more on the lower side, showing a lot of songs with speechiness-values below 0.1. According to Spotify API, this means that her albums contain mostly non-speech-like songs (songs < 0.33). However, this is not what I personally experience when I listen to Beyoncé’s music. Therefore, I’m not sure what to conclude from this graph.
Albums show a diversity in keys, which means a contrast between the songs in her albums.
- In this graph, the musical key percentage of Beyoncé’s albums is shown.
- After I created this graph, purely out of interest in the keys she uses for her songs, I was not sure if this graph would be of any use for my research.
- However, the graph does show something I feel is important for my research, namely the diversity in keys she uses in her albums. Besides the fact that the D#/Eb key is neglected in her songs, all the keys are used in songs of at least three of her albums. I’m not sure if this has in any way effect on my opinion that her albums are so diverse, but it shows some contrast between the songs in her albums.
Structure of Love On Top. Timbre and pitch features shown in self-similarity matrix.
- As I already explained in the introduction, I’m interested in the key changes of the song Love On Top, because this song is very well-known for it. Therefore, I will take a look at the chroma and timbre features.
- In the two self-similarity matrices (SSMs) you can see chroma as well as timbre features of the song Love On Top. Left, you see the chroma features, which show the harmonic and melodic characteristics. Right, the timbre features are shown, which show the changes in timbre and instrumentation.
- In the chroma SSM, the dark diagonal lines from 0 to 180 seconds show repetition in pitches. The diagonal lines disappear after approximately 180 seconds. I think this happens because in the last two minutes of the song, the chorus is repeated and goes through four key changes, starting in C major and proceeding to Db major, then to D major, Eb major, and finally to E major.
- In the timbre SSM, I can’t really see any patterns. I think there’s mostly an similar timbre throughout the song (even instrumentation and beat, and a verse-chorus form with different vocals).
Chromagram of Love On Top. Here, the modulations are shown more clearly.
In this chromagram, the key changes/modulations of Love On Top (which I explained in the self-similarity matrix) are shown more clearly. As you can see, after 180 seconds the song switches from C major to Db major, D major, Eb major, and lastly to E major.
Songs of the album Beyoncé show a similar tempo, which is a different pattern than the songs of the other albums, which have a more varied tempo.
- In this graph, I’ve compared the variables tempo, loudness and duration of two older albums, Dangerously In Love and B-Day Deluxe Edition, with two newer albums, Beyoncé and Lemonade.
- The album Beyoncé seems to be different in tempo than the other albums. It’s kind of funny to see that Beyoncé has a lot of songs (seven of the fourteen songs) around a mean tempo of 140 bpm, whereas the songs of the other albums are more spread out.
Albums show major difference in timbre coefficient 2.
- In this graph, the difference in timbre coefficients between four of Beyoncé’s albums can be seen.
- I know this graph is a bit intense to take in, and I initially wanted to take out two albums because it’s so crowded, but I’m curious about the situation at y = c02. You can see major differences in this coefficient between the four albums. I would like to know what this coefficient actually means in the timbre, but I haven’t found out so far.